Three seemingly disparate events came together for me the other morning. One was the time my Harvard Law School classmates celebrated my birthday during Contracts class. The second was an unintended slight that became the subject of a Zoom meeting. The third was news that Donald Trump had reversed himself a second time and thrown his administration’s negotiations with Harvard into further confusion.
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Harvard’s first year law class used to be divided into four sections, each consisting of about 140 students (1Ls) who attended the same main courses for the entire year. My birthday was one of two that my section celebrated. The birthday cake was a touching gesture. Still, what had I done to deserve it? I’d made several friends in my section, but I couldn’t claim to be especially popular, nor had I contributed anything of significance during class discussions. I fell back on an old question: Was it my disability? Or rather, how I was perceived as managing with it?
Forward to the present: A friend who also attended Harvard leads a support group on Zoom for people who are losing or have recently lost their sight. She lost her own vision fifteen or so years ago. She also volunteers as a food packer for a neighborhood service providing for the needy where, last week, a fellow volunteer thanked her for her work. She told the support group it left her feeling like an outsider. What she was doing, packing food items, was no different from what her co-volunteer was doing. It would have been one thing if a manager had thanked her, but it felt discordant coming from someone doing exactly the same thing.
Sighted people might ask, why so sensitive, even petulant? It’s a question my sensitive friend asked herself. When she raised it with the support group, she was offered practical suggestions for how to respond in similar predicaments, but her disheartening feeling of being “other” went without comment.
This is the kind of quandary disabled people encounter that can be puzzling to others. Many tasks are harder for blind people. An example that came up during the meeting was locating items in a kitchen cupboard. The participant had been praised for doing just that. Rhetorically, he asked the group, “How could I function if I couldn’t find what’s in the cupboard?” Point taken. But the person praising him was acknowledging that doing so takes more organization and effort than a sighted person’s quick glance.
The lives of disabled people are filled with contradictions. Although we sometimes struggle to achieve what others do with little or no thought, we want to be perceived as normal; hence our resistance to praise for small accomplishments, which makes us feel, as my friend said, “other.”
It might seem equally petulant that my 1L birthday cake should introduce thoughts of otherness into my mind. It was a sign of genuine respect and affection. However, possibly everyone else in our section was equally deserving, and yet only only of us got a cake.
Like those of disabled people, the lives of law students and lawyers are filled with contradictions. We were law students training for a profession often derided for its reliance on abstract rules and cunning schemes to get guilty people off. Yet for most of my classmates, I was the first blind person they’d encountered, and their impulse was to offer moral and other support.
I like to believe that as more and more disabled people enter the mainstream, we will explain ourselves better and become better understood. As it was, my classmates’ gesture came from a generous place.
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My Harvard Law birthday cake and that Harvard alum’s support group sessions reflect the best in people, one reason I found the news about Trump’s change of mind painful.
He launched his ideological assault on Harvard with a demand for $200,000,000. Later, he retracted the money component. However, as I learned the other morning, when that reversal went public, he reversed himself again and raised the demand to a billion dollars, accompanying it with insults unbefitting a nation’s leader.
Institutions, like people, are full of contradictions. Undoubtedly, Harvard has problems. Every institution does, although what they might be are seen differently by different people. Personally, I object to some of what conservatives call “woke” at Harvard, even though I’m politically liberal, as well as the undue influence its wealthiest alums appear to wield. There can never be consensus. It’s why a complex institution like Harvard must constantly examine itself. But shortcomings should be addressed in a civil manner, not with petulant, vituperative broadsides.
Under Trump’s assault, my appreciation of Harvard has increased as I recall so much of its community’s unsung humanity that the two anecdotes in this post only hint at. Throughout America, I am thankful that kindness still permeates our lives even in these dark, icy days.
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